October 2013

According to The New York Times, there are 2500 crisis pregnancy centers in the United States versus 1800 abortion clinics. For those who think that pro-lifers aren’t doing anything to help women with their babies, think again.

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“Although feminism purports to raise the value and status of women, it actually deconstructs femininity, treating it as an illusion or even an aberration. The male chauvinist of the past identified women as unique and different, but then treated femininity as a lesser thing than masculinity. The feminist of today, rather than celebrating femininity as a thing of equal worth, dismisses it as a bourgeois construction. Far from championing femininity as a beautiful, God-created gift, the feminist absorbs femininity into a hyper-masculine world of competition, struggle, and ideology.” – Louis Markos, “Just Brilliant!: Three Things only a PhD Can Believe,” Salvo, Issue 24, Spring 2013, page 16.

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I have written in the past of gay men who opposed same-sex marriage (for various reasons). While it’s old news at this point, I ran across a couple of more recently. Rupert Everett, a gay British actor, told The Sunday Times magazine he opposed same-sex marriage (and all marriage for that matter) and same-sex parenting because children need mothers and fathers.

At about the same time, Doug Mainwaring, also a gay man, published an opinion article in The Washington Post:

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In 2006, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the NJ legislature must give same-sex couples all of the same rights and benefits as opposite-sex couples, but did not demand that the state amend its marriage laws. The legislature responded by creating civil unions that had identical benefits to marriage.

Fast forward seven years, and Judge Mary C. Jacobson of the State Superior Court ruled on September 27, 2013 that this is not enough – the state must call same-sex unions marriage as well starting Monday, October 21, 2013. Governor Christie vowed to appeal the decision to the NJ Supreme Court, but when that court refused to block the law while Christie challenged it, and made it clear that they would not rule in his favor, he decided to withdraw his appeal, meaning NJ is now the 14th state to offer same-sex marriage.

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“The person who can’t or won’t discern good from evil is destined to be a victim of those who are adept at disguising one as the other. Thus, abstaining from moral judgments is not a hallmark of nice people, but of foolish ones. And the person who makes judgments while insisting that he doesn’t or shouldn’t is naïve, if not hypocritical.” – Regis Nicoll, “Speak No Evil,” Salvo, Issue 25, Summer 2013, p. 14.

Those who subscribe to empiricism believe that we should not believe the truth of some X based on a competent authority. We are only justified in believing some X if we have empirically verifiable evidence supporting the truth of X. It goes without notice that this principle itself is not empirically verifiable, and thus empiricism is self-refuting as a complete theory of knowledge. But let’s ignore the man behind the curtain for a moment, and explore other deficiencies in an empirical epistemology.

In his book, A Universe from Nothing, physicist and empiricist Lawrence Krauss describes the state of the cosmos in the distant future. Due to cosmic expansion, in two trillion years all of the evidence for the Big Bang (cosmic microwave background, redshift of distant objects/the Hubble expansion, and the measurement of light elements in the cosmos), and all 400 billion galaxies visible to us now, will no longer be detectable via empirical methods. Worse yet, all of the evidence for the dark energy that caused the cosmic expansion will be gone as well. For scientists living in that day, all of the empirical evidence will point to a static universe inhabited by a single galaxy that is no more than a trillion years old (based on the ratio of light elements at the time).

Last year theoretical physicist and atheist, Lawrence Krauss, wrote a book titled A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing. As the title suggests, Krauss wrote the book to answer the age-old question of why there is something rather than nothing. The book was heralded by many atheists as the definitive answer to theists who claim God is necessary to explain the existence of physical reality. Indeed, in the afterward Richard Dawkins claimed that Krauss’ book devastates theistic arguments based on cosmology just as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species devastated theistic arguments based on design in biology. Other reviewers, however – including scientists, philosophers, and theologians – beg to differ. Having read the book myself (not just once, but two times now), I can see why they were less than impressed with Krauss’ argument.

While my overall assessment of Krauss’ argument is not positive, truth be told, most of the book was quite enjoyable and informative. That’s because the first 2/3 of the book is a lesson on the historical development of modern cosmology. Krauss doesn’t make his case for why there is something rather than nothing until the last four chapters. Unfortunately, that’s where the book falls apart.